


Hellfire

by dragonlover



Category: Halo (Video Games) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Devil worship, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2007-10-09
Updated: 2007-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 21:06:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29814384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonlover/pseuds/dragonlover
Summary: The story of a rogue Spartan who believes himself to be an agent of the devil. Hell hath no fury like a Spartan scorned...





	Hellfire

My name is Pearce.

I have no last name.

Not to say I never had one, just that I don’t now. What it was… I can’t even remember. Now, I have a number: 013.

Heh. You know, according to superstition, ‘13’ is the number of the devil. I’m sure you don’t believe in anything that silly. After all, I’m just one in a sequence of hundreds.

Spartans, that’s what they call us. After the mighty warriors of ancient Sparta. According to legend, a mere 300 of them held off an army of two and a half million invaders. Dead to the last man, of course. Noble sacrifices to buy time for the real army to be built.

They would train their sons from childhood, put them through untold strife to become men, warriors, of their country. That’s what the UNSC, in its infinite wisdom, took its inspiration from. Same as Nazi Germany with their Hitler Youth program, but we should never draw _that_ comparison. Oh no, that would be blasphemy.

It all started back in 2517. ONI, true to its demonic name, sent out its ninjas to harvest. Children of every race were taken to satisfy their greed for power, to secure their dominion in this world.

I’m sure you’ve heard their propaganda. You probably think they created the Spartans from a group of carefully selected volunteers in order to defend Earth and her colonies from the Covenant menace. Well, think again.

Candidates were selected from all of the civilian population, and then abducted from their homes at the age of six. These _children_ were replaced with flash-clones to insure their families would never suspect the truth. No, they only had to watch as a clone they thought to be their child sunk slowly into deterioration.

But, wait, I hear you say, wasn’t all this worthwhile? Wasn’t defeating the Covenant far more important than the happiness of mere civilians? Well, then, you’d be surprised to learn that the Spartans were never created with the Covenant in mind.

First contact was in 2525, fourteen years after the Spartan program was first conceived. No, the Spartans were created to deal with a far more human presence: the United Rebel Front, then scourge of the CAA and its kind. It still is, I suppose. Still, hardly worthy of such immoral actions.

You still uncertain? Well, I’ll fill you in a bit more on Spartan life. This Spartan’s, anyway.

I was just six, of course, when they took me. Heh, I saw that twitch. Anyway, I was just minding my own business, watching a silly holovid of ÜberKingGodzilla liquefying New Tokyo, when the ninjas knocked me out. It must have been a tranq dart of some kind. One minute I was a free citizen of Jericho VII, and the next I was waking up from cryo sleep being ushered into a room filled with 74 other confused kids.

A woman came out – Dr. Catherine Halsey, as I would later learn. Perhaps the greatest criminal ONI owns. She informed us of our fate, that we had been ‘called to serve’ as the ‘protectors of Earth and all her colonies.’ As though the rebels were the greatest issue of worry present.

We were put through strict Marine training from that day forward. Mendez, CPO Franklin Mendez, woke us up at 5:30 AM, and if we weren’t moving as fast as he’d like, we’d get a tap from an electric baton. Mendez would run us outside, where he’d make us perform 100 jumping jacks, 100 sit ups, and 100 crouches.

Afterwards, he’d make us jog about a mile to our next instructor, a ‘dumb’ AI as they call them. Then Déjà, the AI, taught us about math, history, and battle tactics. We also got a few crackers and milk for our breakfast. A meager meal by any means.

We were thus inclined to try and steal more food from our fellow Spartans. If we were ever caught, we were heavily punished. Not truly for stealing, you understand, but for getting caught. They wanted us to band together, but for the strong to weed out the weak. These died through the training, the ‘necessary sacrifices’ as they told us.

Anyway, after Déjà, we jogged another two miles to the ‘playground.’ This was a maze built in mid-air with a bell at the top. We were then formed into teams, and raced to ring the bell. The team that came in last had to go without supper.

This was the routine for the first couple of months.

After that, Mendez added a new class after the morning calisthenics. There, he taught us how to strip a trip line, fire a rifle, and treat a chest wound. His exercises often had a twist to them like stun mines on the obstacle course, snipers with paint guns during parade drills, and various others.

Some months later, we were taught how to survive in the wilderness. How to recognize edible plants; how to track and hunt animals… Oh, and how to sew shut our own wounds without painkillers. _That_ was fun.

Around two years later, our skills were put to the test. Mendez flew us out to a military wilderness training preserve, where we were each given a section of a map and told to meet at an extraction point. The last Spartan there would have to walk back, of course.

But our unofficial leader, the future Master Chief Petty Officer John-117, he secretly had us plan to meet at a lake near the LZ. There we put the map back together and planned to walk to the point as one, forcing the Marines to let us all come. It was a glorious moment, the kind they write songs about. ‘No man left behind’ was our guiding star in that moment, heralding a new age of Spartan cooperation and justice.

Pity it all fell apart.

See, when we got to the extraction point, the men around the Pelican weren’t in uniform. Okay. So, I guess we figured they were rebels. Like the URF cared about us at all back then.

John, clever as he always was, devised a way to retake the Pelican. Using Kelly-087, the fastest member of our class, we lured the ‘rebels’ out into the open. Once they were exposed, we beat them with rocks and stolen electric batons until they collapsed.

There wasn’t strictly a pilot, but Déjà was there to help us with the autopilot. Once we got back to the training facility, we learned that it was all a trick. The men were, in fact, UNSC and had been instructed to keep us away from the Pelican by any means necessary. Mendez and Halsey judged the exercise a success and promoted John to Squad Leader.

That night I approached Grace-093 and first broached the subject of rebellion. We had all thought about it at one point or another, but until then none of us ever felt the courage to give voice to our thoughts of dissent.


End file.
